Office 2010 was released a little under over two years ago and Microsoft is now gearing up for its successor. PJ Hough, CVP of Development for the Microsoft Office Division, just announced today on the Microsoft Office Blog that Office 15 has now entered the Technical Preview stage.

With the Technical Preview, Microsoft is getting feedback from some its most important customers on what to change, what to keep, and what to throw out of the next iteration of Office. Of course, those customers are under an NDA so we still won't know much about the productivity unless someone starts leaking information out (which they inevitably will).

"I'm not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division," said Hough. "With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before. "

Hough also made it clear that the public beta of Office 15 will be released this summer. We should expect to see the retail product launch later this year around the same time as Windows 8.

How many people even use half of the new features of office, let alone any?

I have seen many updates to MS Office but every person still uses the basic math functions in Excel and spell check in Word.

I installed Libre Office, free office suite that is replacing open office, and it does everything I think 99% of people use office for. Wish the Fed Gov and more colleges would use it, LO, just to see how many REALLY complain due to a lose of function. Let alone the money saved.

They won't save money, the number one reason really big companies go for paid programs isn't cause they are better (although it helps) it's the support options that the programs have. If you have a problem with LibreOffice there is no number to call for customer support, you must have your own support staff and people who know the program, while if you buy Office from MS you can call them and get help without having to train and pay your own support people. It's the reason a company using Linux will still pay for RedHat, it's the support that is important to them.

I can see better SharePoint integration as one of few thing M$ could add (not sure if that necessary). Now most corporations become locked in the product licensing scheme and end up upgrading every now and then (even if only small percentage of their users knows more than 10% of Office features and hates ribbon). Personally I'm OK with notepad with a spell check. Even Open Office is more than most people needed - it's the result of marketing that they keep asking for it and businesses do a wonderful job of passing unnecessary upgrade costs onto customers.Expect Office 16 in few years.

I agree the new "features" aren't all used, but the ribbon interface is much easier to get accustomed to and actually use the features available. Besides the new ribbon interface, not much else excites me about office 2010.

Having used word to write a 200 page thesis, all I can say is that it was shocking how terrible Word really is. While most people don't go beyond a short report that requires few features other than spellcheck, a long report requiring several automatically generated tables (contents, figures, equations), proper referencing (again automatically updated), and numbering of figures and equations reveals how utterly terrible Word is for a ~20 year old program. Don't even get me stared with the equation editor (yes, the "new" one).

While something might be possible to achieve in Word, it is generally terribly obtuse, requiring significant manual labor, and absolutely frustrating to implement. For example, their options for citations is appallingly short, so you have to search the web for a site where people build citation styles during their spare time and then awkwardly install them.

I simply cannot believe it is the world's most popular document editor and that after 20 years it is still such a piece of garbage. After 20 years of development it should be certifiably the most perfect document editor of all time. I've moved to LaTeX where I can, but anything my supervisor must edit must be in Word because LaTeX isn't for the "technically challenged".

I'd like to have the best of both worlds. The GUI of Word and the power of LaTeX. In the face of a dozen FREE office knock-offs, Microsoft needs to make their Office suite unique and more powerful.

Why would anyone write a thesis in Word? It is not what it is targeted for. There are much better tools available; I have never seen MS market Word as a tool for thesis and dissertation writing so it should not be suprising it is less than ideal in that role.

I'm all ears if you can suggest a better word processor that stodgy old professors would be willing to make edits in.

Considering the simplicity of Office compared to less profitable software (eg. video games), it isn't unreasonable to expect this ubiquitous standard software would be much much better. How many billion have they made off this software? Give us an Office suite worth of 2012, not 1998!

I wonder if office 15 will have a hybrid traditional desktop mode and metro touch based mode. Clearly using a touch interface is not ideal for some office tasks, but I could see it working well for others (like laying out power point presentations, or using your finger to spell out simple notes quickly in onenote)

This is exactly what I've been thinking since Office 15 was announced. I hope they don't make 2 different version of each that have to be run separately from the different interfaces. That could get irritating very fast and I think we would all just use the classic mode for everything.